9.22.2008

I'm at Carlo's house right now and I was browsing a book he was reading called Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinty. [1]

In it I found this illuminating quote that Carlo had highlighted:

Adult descriptions of infractions on the referrals often invoked their reading of the tone of the exchange as expressed through children's body language...girl received after-school detention for a "sassy mouth, standing with attitude, walking away when I called her in the 6th grade line at lunch." The same girl got two days of in-house detention for "disruption in class. disrespectual [sic] and defiant when spoken to. Mouthy and had an attitude." A white girl was sent to cool off in the Punishing Room after charged with "defiance; flapping & pointing; slamming drawers, called Sharon a bitch."

What is most significant for us here is that reading of "defiant attitude" are often deciphered through a racialized key...

Notes

1. Ann Arnett Ferguson, Bad Boys: Public School in the Making of Black Masculinity (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004),67-68.

9.17.2008

Yolanda Charley, recently won the title ofMiss. Navajo Nation. I am normally against beauty contests, as I see them as nothing more than the performance of femininity for the male gaze. The Miss Navajo Nation is like noother pageant I have ever come across.

...

What I love about this contest is that it is more than women parading around with fake smiles, with their bathing suits taped to their skin, to avoid being swallowed by their asses. Miss Navajo is about celebration, and the perpetuation of culture.

9.12.2008

We were never meant to be a part of the colonial system and I find it embarrassing that those who are chosen to represent us do not have the courage to speak about this in real, coherent and tangible terms. Instead, we talk of what it like for Indians to be a part of the DNC and RNC conventions and who got to speak before large crowds and which “tribe” will adopt a candidate who in the end will do absolutely nothing for our people but keep us in our respective place at the bottom of the U.S. totem pole. And we ask ourselves why we get so little respect.

This podcast is a little long (nearly 21 minutes) but totally worth it. I went to Bambu's Exact Change album release tour on Tuesday at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco and I just had to highlight some of the folks that performed their art on the stage.

This was the first time I saw Bambu perform since Native Guns broke up (long time man, long time) and this was also the last performance EyeASage will do until her album comes up. So it was good to catch her before she goes into seclusion (she clowned my phone, man! Can't believe it! Ain't nothing wrong with vintage 1998 cell phones! :-) ) to work on her album.

9.11.2008

The most difficult contradiction to face is that even if Obama makes 1.5-2 things better for some people of color in America, we know that he is nothing but a flyer, better-dressed, younger face to the New World Order AKA the same ol' American Empire that has been running shit for the past several hundred years.

9.06.2008

Kimchi Mamas first blogged about this a couple of weeks ago... What kind of messed up nonsense is this? This Mother Goose and Grimm comic strip is a couple of weeks old, but dude, what the hell? Come on! Really? They really had to go there with the idiotic Korean dog-eating joke?

Double Consciousness is a term that comes from the pen of W. E. B. Du Bois which was made popular in his book The Souls of Black Folk. For Du Bois it meant “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” and of having two identities, one being American and the other being a person of color. “Two warring ideals in one dark body.” The title is also a pun on the fact that the two blog founders/editors are of different ethnicities which obviously effects the way they perceive the world. Jack Stephens is white (three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Guatemalan) and C is Pilipino. Despite this fact they are both unified in their thought on critiquing white privilege in American society and in combating its effects on people of color.